


The Sound of Memories

by Procrastinating_Dragonfly



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: All of Ateez appear, Angst, Gen, Immortality, Kinda, Open Ending, Past Pirate!Ateez, Tagged Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings for final Character Death, but it's positive, but very briefly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:48:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26182933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Procrastinating_Dragonfly/pseuds/Procrastinating_Dragonfly
Summary: Seonghwa is old, so very old, and tired of chasing memories.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	The Sound of Memories

**Author's Note:**

> We all know the fanfiction event was a flaming disaster, but I finally gathered the courage to post my entry on here, too, because I am actually quite proud of it ;; Late to the party, but like, fashionably late.

Seonghwa flinches when the train runs by. 

It’s been decades since they appeared. He’s used to them. He’s been on trains thousands of times. They’re still too loud after all this time, and Seonghwa is old, so very old. His ears work just as well as any other twenty-year-old’s, but his patience is running thin with age. He despises loud noises. 

He never would’ve thought he would be back in Korea, after all this time. She couldn’t possibly be here, he had accepted it centuries ago, and yet all of his journeys ultimately led him back to where he had begun. Seonghwa doesn’t know whether it’s a cruel mockery of fate, or his own idiocy, but he’s here now, bones aching with the tension of her presence. 

He doesn’t have a name, nor an address. He doesn’t even know what shape she has taken, this time.

He has the necklace, though. It’s all he needs. He holds it, twists the cool metal around his fingers, plays with the weight in his palm. 

He closes his eyes, and waits. 

Footsteps run by, hurried. Seonghwa whips around, just in time to see a flash of auburn. A young boy, phone in hand, rushing forward.

_ Yunho. _

He doesn’t follow the ghost. He’s learned, by now. They’re gone, and the brief glimpses he gets of them in random passersby will not unite them; but they’re there to guide him, so that they may meet again. 

Seonghwa follows the boy’s footsteps, necklace in hand. He doesn’t walk for too long before he reaches a dead end, standing at the entrance of a park. He barely has time to close his eyes again and focus on the faint buzzing in his hand, before he hears a stone bouncing off the ground and rolling in the distance. 

Another boy. Sitting on a swing, hair bleached, eyes fixed on the ground. For an instant, Seonghwa knows it’s Yeosang, standing in front of him, but as soon as he blinks, the face is gone. Just another person. 

He sits on the other swing, and waits. 

He waits for what feels like a small eternity. It’s probably no longer than half an hour, just the time for the sun to begin setting on the horizon, before the necklace buzzes again. Seonghwa closes his eyes. 

Behind him, car tires screech to a halt. 

He opens his eyes barely in time to catch him. San, quick like an arrow, jumping out of the door of the moving car and sprinting in the distance. Seonghwa blinks, jumps to his feet to run after him. San never waited for anyone. 

Seonghwa runs after the boy, until he loses sight of him. When he disappears between two buildings, as if he had never existed, Seonghwa stops in his tracks and curses. 

He’s lost him. 

He made it all the way here, just to lose track of her again. 

Just as he feels his chest overflow with the bile of defeat, the necklace buzzes in his hand. With a sharp inhale, he screws his eyes shut, and waits for the next signal. A deaf thud. It’s just a boy throwing away trash, but when he turns around, Seonghwa sees Mingi’s familiar face, clear as day. 

He walks there. He can’t follow the stranger inside the building, but he doesn’t need to. She will never hide in an apartment. She’s here, outside, with him. Seonghwa stops by the garbage bins, with closed eyes and bated breath, clenching the necklace in his hand so hard he can feel the indentations in his skin. 

The sound of glass shattering in the distance is deafening; Seonghwa ignores the way his heartbeat picks up in panic, and runs towards it. 

It’s impossible to miss the scene; three boys fighting outside a high school, chairs lying on the grass of the courtyard, outside a broken window. Wooyoung always got into the worst brawls, every time the crew stopped at port. Seonghwa spots him easily, marching off with a bloody nose and fire in his eyes. He follows the boy until he, too, disappears inside an apartment complex. 

Seonghwa can feel it in his bones. He’s almost made it. He will find her, this time. She has hidden from him for too long. 

The routine is familiar, by now. He holds the necklace, closes his eyes, and waits. When a ball bounces behind him, he opens eyes, and turns to the basketball field to his right. For the briefest moment, he sees Jongho, slumped on a bench, before he disappears, leaving Seonghwa in front of yet another stranger. 

Seonghwa sits, again, and waits. 

Will Hongjoong come to him, this time? It would be a first. Their captain has always avoided him, in death. Maybe, just maybe, he will appear this time, before Seonghwa finds her. 

The necklace starts glowing. 

Seonghwa barely has time to spring to his feet in shock before an invisible force snatches it from his hand and throws it around his neck. The jewelry pulls him forward on an invisible leash, uncaring of the way his stumbling steps struggle to keep up. The boy on the bench stares off into the horizon; he doesn’t seem to notice Seonghwa running after a magical necklace. 

And there she is. Standing in front of him like a vision, and the most concrete thing he has ever seen. One moment he’s alone, and the other she’s right there, looking like any other woman on the streets of Seoul, yet surrounded by  _ her _ unmistakable aura, the scent of youth and antiquity all at once. 

Seonghwa could laugh. He could cry. He could grab her and demand she undo her curse, beg her to free him. 

He stands still, face emotionless. There’s nothing he can do that would clear the centuries of loneliness brought by her hand. 

“Hebe.”

Hebe smiles. “Park Seonghwa. It’s been a while.”

“Free me. Please,” he whispers. His voice sounds broken to his own ears, but she must have heard him scream for her countless times. This is the least undignified he’s been, in front of her. “I don’t want this.”

“Once upon a time you were begging for my blessings. You asked me to be young for all of eternity. Remember?”

Seonghwa frantically shakes his head. He can’t have made it this far just to be denied, after all these centuries of looking for her. 

“I was wrong,” he insists. “I don’t want this. I was wrong.”

“All mortals are.” When she smiles, she almost looks motherly. She looks like a child. Seonghwa hates it, and is filled with the same reverence of the first time he’d seen the goddess. “Some immortals, too. You’ve been very brave, all these years by yourself. You’ve learned your lesson, Park Seonghwa. You can go, now.”

Seonghwa’s entire body shakes in relief. He doesn’t think he can feel the ends of his fingers, anymore, but he still clings to the necklace. “Will I join them?” 

“I don’t know. Death is not my domain. I can give you youth, or take it away. What happens afterwards is not for me to know, or tell.”    


Seonghwa nods. It doesn’t matter, really. Seonghwa would love to be with them, join them again. Laugh and eat and talk until late night, or whatever version of it exists in the afterlife. Be in their embrace, and  _ their _ scent, not this suffocating perfume of hers. He would die to join them, but if he can’t be with them in death, it doesn’t matter. He can’t live without them. 

“Do it.” 

She moves forward, a smile dancing on her lips. Seonghwa doesn’t move or protest; he lets her gently tip his chin upwards with a finger and come close, ever so close. 

Her lips touch his forehead for a brief instant; then, they’re gone. 

“Your necklace, please,” she whispers, holding a hand out. Seonghwa takes it off. The weight is gone from his neck, like a shackle that is lifted for the first time in centuries. 

The world spins around him. Seonghwa’s body feels impossibly light, abstract. If his eyes were still there, he would cry, but he is dissolving into blessed nothingness, finally free from the weight of eternity. 

Hongjoong. 

He’s standing in front of Seonghwa, hair blue like the sea he drowned into, when he insisted he would go down with his ship all that time ago. Seonghwa wants to reach out to him, but he can’t move his arms, when they feel like they’re no longer there.

“Come on, then,” his captain laughs. “We’ve been waiting, you know? There’s so much we have to do.”

Responsibility, even after death. Seonghwa doesn’t mind it. If they can all be together, eternal rest can be damned. As long as he can hug his friends again, he will do anything, in this cursed life or the next. 

The sun is blue, above him. Seonghwa thinks it’s pretty, fitting for a dream, another world. His lips curve into a smile of their own, for the first time in so long, and he lets go of the final hold he has on this plane.

He closes his eyes, and drowns in a sky of purple stars. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving kudos and comments to keep encouraging your writers! If anyone wants to talk about anything, you can find me on Twitter @lazy_libellula.


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